


Meeting the Owl

by Gorramshiny



Category: Young Wizards - Diane Duane
Genre: Gen, New Wizard, Spoilers for Owl Be Home for Christmas
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-06
Updated: 2021-01-06
Packaged: 2021-03-16 13:53:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,724
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28583049
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gorramshiny/pseuds/Gorramshiny
Summary: A wizard just finding out about her magic goes to the forest to try it out, and is helped by a certain owl of the neighborhood.
Comments: 4
Kudos: 9





	Meeting the Owl

**Author's Note:**

> While this doesn't directly reference Owl Be Home, it does contain spoilers for that story.

**August 2022**   
The upstate New York wilderness was cozy this time of year, if one could ignore the occasional gust of biting wind that threw leaves and pine needles from the trees. Thebe could, at least mostly. She’d taken the bit about not wasting energy seriously from her new magic-promising phone, and bundled up for the nighttime hike from her dad’s woodshop to the nearby nature preserve. It was normally easier to think out here, and for trying a first real spell, it would be safer than at home in her bedroom where her dad might knock on her door. He at least respected that she needed her alone time if she went for a walk. But she hadn’t taken the “every living thing uses the Speech” part to heart and...

The trees talked. Of course the trees talked, once she thought about it for half a second. Their interminable rustling sounded like something from a distant memory, but they were so _loud_ and there were _so many_. And the bugs and the grass and the birds and the ferns and the family of deer she passed and…

She’d put her fingers in her ears a half-mile ago, but when she got to her usual downed log to sit and think and try to block out the noise or find her earplugs, the noise of the hundred living creatures in the log assaulted her, a sudden wall of sound. The weight of noise broke her tenuous composure. She collapsed, tears pricking at the corners of her eyes, unable to stop the electricity crackle and static of sensory overload in her head.

“I just want it to stop, please, someone make it stop,” she moaned, unable to process her own speech.

The assault of noise stretched on, each piece indistinguishable from the other.

Then it stopped. It all stopped.

Static kept buzzing in Thebe’s head, and she twitched as her overloaded brain kept misfiring, but she slowly uncurled from the fetal position and looked around. Had she done that? Wasn’t magic supposed to be more involved than that?

“Hello?” a loud voice called from above, breaking the absolute silence.

Thebe flinched and looked around, but couldn’t find the voice’s source.

The voice called again, quieter this time. “Hello?” It had a clear, bell-like, hooting undertone, almost like a phone notification.

Thebe finally found the saw-whet owl resting on a low branch, an orb of feathers less than a foot high. She didn’t feel like talking yet, so she raised a hand to it.

The owl hooted gently again. “You asked for someone to help, right? Help make the noise stop?”

“I…” it was hard to remember. She shrugged, and finally found her voice. “Did you make everything quiet?” she whispered. Could other creatures be wizards? Why not, if humans could. Humans weren’t even the smartest creatures on the planet.

The owl trilled with laughter, and Thebe flinched again, though less this time. “No, Cousin, I silenced your ears.”

Thebe snapped her fingers next to her ears, and heard nothing. She did it a few more times. Her brain expected noise and didn’t hear any, so it blasted her with vertigo and anxiety, and she curled up on herself again.

“Cousin?” the owl hooted again. “Do you want some of it back?”

“Yes,” Thebe moaned, anxiety still churning in her stomach.

Very slowly, noise trickled back into Thebe’s awareness. The regular sounds of the forest, wind in the trees, the soft scrape of her body shifting against the ground. It was all muted, like she wore a good pair of earplugs, but it was enough. She relaxed, and snapped her fingers next to her ears a few times, just to reassure herself the owl hadn’t done anything permanent.

(It faintly occurred to her that she was taking an owl doing magic on her as relatively normal, and she wasn’t quite sure how she felt about that either.)

As Thebe pulled herself up to sit crosslegged, the owl hooted with the self-satisfied humor of an in-joke, “So, spelling problem?”

“What?” And then she processed what the owl had probably said. “Oh, no, I don’t have a problem with a spell, I just got a new phone and it offered me magic and of course I said yes, it’s _magic_ , but I wanted to try it first without my dad being around so I didn’t get in trouble or something, not that I would, he wouldn’t think I’m Satanic or something, we aren’t like that, but I just didn’t want to be disturbed.”

The owl blinked a few times and took a hop backwards. “I can go if you would like.”

“No! No, um, that’s okay!” This was another wizard. Maybe it was an owl but it could still do magic, and maybe she could learn something. “Um, what’s your name?”

The owl responded with a few roiling hoots. Thebe tried her best to process it. “I think I heard ‘Rooey’ in there somewhere? Is that okay?”

The owl hooted a shrug. “It’s good enough. What is your name?”

Thebe said her name and Rooey hooted it back, but it came out as “Thee”. Thebe shrugged. “It’s good enough.”

They watched each other for a moment. Rooey’s head twitched, and she shuffled in the dirt. Thebe admired Rooey's coat, and eyes. She’d been so thrown off by magic she’d not realized this was the closest she’d ever been to a wild owl. There was something different and lovely about it, especially if she was going to be learning magic.

She wet her lips and asked, “Can you teach me that spell? The silence one. I think it would be really useful.”

Rooey hopped with excitement, and Thebe grinned, shaking her own hands and sharing Rooey's excitement.

“Okay, listen close,” Rooey said. She hooted a long series of Speech words carefully, trying to enunciate each one. 

Thebe waited, but nothing else happened. “Did it not work?”

“I didn’t want it to!” Rooey replied. “Spells don’t work if you don’t have intention! How else could we teach each other how to do them!”

Thebe’s phone went _ding_. She thought she didn’t usually get cell reception up here.

The notification showed a Manual function, and she opened it. A spell diagram filled the screen. Thebe punched a popup “test” button on her phone to get it out of the way of the diagram. The phone hooted like Rooey had, and even though it was some type of Speech, Thebe could understand almost none of it. Rooey hooted and trilled back. The test button popped up again. Thebe poked it. The phone hooted again. Rooey responded with a sharp, decisive hoot, and a button replaced “test” with “lay”.

“There. Your metal helper box heard me wrong,” Rooey grumbled.

Thebe clicked the “lay” button and the flashlight function turned on, displaying the diagram across her pant leg. Once she stood up, and spell diagram shone on the ground in fairly large text, the light shut off, but the diagram stayed, glowing softly. An open space flashed, asking for Thebe’s wizardly Name and a designated Target. Thebe laid her name--which she’d gotten yesterday after the incredibly in-depth internet-style personality quiz in the Manual app--into both spots.

Rooey eyed the diagram critically. “Do you want to try it?” 

Thebe paused. Was this it? Was this actual magic? Well, if it was, then she was going to be doing magic! 

With twenty minutes of double-checking terms in the Speech dictionary, asking Rooey and the Manual for advice on pronunciation, and screwing together her courage, Thebe was finally ready to try working her way through the spell. She started stumbling her way through it, and the noise bled away again, though this time there was no anxiety rising with it. The trees above her, the owl wizard in front of her, even the bugs in the log seemed to be hanging onto her words as she spoke, listening for how she might (if only temporarily) rewrite the world. The silence was full, rather than empty, and the spell seemed to unravel itself from deep in Thebe’s throat and the words on the ground at the same time, almost speaking itself now that Thebe knew what she wanted.

And then it was done.

And nothing seemed to have changed.

“Was that it?” she said.

Rooey blinked at her. “I stopped my spell as you finished yours. The lack of sound you hear now is your own power, not mine.”

It was Thebe’s turn to blink. And then grin. And then whoop, though she heard it quietly, and throw her fist in the air. This was magic! The power to make a situation what you needed it to be! She’d actually done it! Now the insufferable headaches from her dad’s woodshop noise interrupting her homework could go away, and so could the overstimulation of the drag races and farmers markets in the closest town when her family went in to get groceries. It would finally be in her power to do something about the noise, rather than earplugs that only helped sometimes, or the shop earmuffs that didn’t fit her ears right and gave her a different kind of headache. 

“Thank you.” She grinned at the owl.

Rooey twisted her head and hooted, pleased. “Be careful how much energy you use. The spell will mostly run itself, but it does need help, and doesn’t turn off automatically unless you fall asleep.”

Now that she mentioned it, Thebe did feel a little burr in her chest, like a gentle tug of a string as energy was drawn from her.

She nodded. “I’ll be careful.” She checked her phone, and blanched. It was almost 2AM. “I need to go. Thank you so much for your help. Can I find you here again?”

The owl hopped and hooted, another shrug. “I need to hunt. I will not always be here, and I will not always be free, but ask trees or owls about me and you can find my tree.” The owl gave a long farewell hoot and flew to a nearby branch, then took off again, winging into the night.

Thebe grinned all the way home, and remembered to turn the spell off when she got out of the forest. Somehow, she knew how to without looking it up.


End file.
